Conventional belt-roll fusers include an internal pressure roll (“IPR”), which entrains a fuser belt, and an external pressure roll (“EPR”). A fusing nip is conventionally defined by a region under pressure between the EPR and the IPR. Conventional belt-roll fusers utilize a hard IPR and a soft EPR to form a fusing nip for fusing an image to a substrate that has just received toner from a transfer station. See FIG. 1 for an example of a related art belt-roll fuser architecture.
Conventional belt-roll fusers often have a stripping shoe that is used to load an inner side of the fuser belt to generate an effective fusing nip pressure, and cause the substrate to strip from the fuser belt. While the stripping shoe may help generate an effective fusing nip pressure, and cause the substrate to strip from the fuser belt, belt-roll fusers that utilize a conventional stripping shoe still often face image related defects such as, but not limited to, gloss related image quality (“IQ”) defects, mottle, stripping performance, and failure to demonstrate process latitude. These issues may be caused by any number of issues, including, but not limited to, failure to optimially strip the substrate from the fuser belt and/or a variance in the strip point due to a variance in image content, media size, media coating, media weight, media thickness, media stiffness, process speed, process conditions, etc.